Ah, it's not so bad.

Tag Archives: politics

Whatever Republicans say their path is to maybe contesting some national elections in the future, I think this is the real strategy.

“We didn’t lose because we didn’t have 50 debates,” said Priebus. “I’m talking about having a reasonable number of debates where we can have a greater say in who the moderators are. Because we’ve got moderators who are in the business of making news, at the expense. I think we’re committing malpractice when we have no control over who these moderators are and the formats of these primary debates. I’m sure the grassroots would appreciate that.”

Priebus is saying that the problem was Republican candidates being forced (or allowed) to express themselves too freely, and I think that’s pretty convincing. They could have avoided a lot of War on Women blowback while pursuing the exact same policies, just by getting the Akins and Santorums in the party to shut their mouths.

Less convincing is the idea that it’ll work on something like immigration reform or gay marriage. It may be too late to backtrack, which is why you see moderate Republicans jumping ship. But every time a Republican says they just need to explain their position on immigration better, and change nothing, that’s what they mean: sell GOP policies as everything they aren’t (pro-immigrant, pro-Latino) while avoiding any major gaffes that would betray this lie.

Here’s a stupid story by a stupid guy named Mark Krikorian in the (stupid) National Review. His post-election philosophy is a popular one with Republicans: everyone is too in love with the welfare state for the Republican party to ever be viable again, so let’s double down on radical conservativism because maybe that’ll squeeze out one more election victory.

Kirkorian is talking specifically about immigration to the US. Romney lost the Latino vote 27 percent to 71 percent(!). That’s a big drop from Bush who tried to pass center-right immigration reform and got 40 percent. If Romney had Bush’s numbers with Latinos the popular vote would have been a near-tie. So should the GOP accept centrist immigration reform and drop their anti-immigrant, anti-Latino plank? Nah.

Immigrants are always using government programs and shit that we want to destroy, he says, because they’re poor, so they’ll never like us. What we need to do, and now he’s kneading his hands frantically and spitting a lot, is get 100% of the CONSERVATIVE vote because we only got 82% and Obama got 17%. In Kirkorian’s mind this means that 17% found Romney insufficiently conservative so they went for Obama, or something? It certainly has nothing to do with different definitions of conservatism, bad exit polling, anything like that. And so really showing the American people how far right the GOP can go will fix everything, shifting demographics be damned.

Matt Yglesias actually agrees that immigration isn’t the Republicans’ problem, even that embracing increased immigration could enlarge “an electorate that’s fundamentally hostile to their worldview.” Meaning, much like with their complete lack of consideration for D.C. statehood or Puerto Rican statehood, they’d be deciding without ideology, just electoral strategy.

Kirkorian ends saying all Republicans can do is “outreach” to Latinos and cooling it on the “harsh rhetoric,” in other words, a hope that some PR changes will lessen his party’s policy hostility to a large portion of the American public.

So, this is one strain of thought on the new Republican party. They essentially declare defeat, acknowledging that their principles don’t permit them to win anyone but whites. Any deviation from their standard antipathy towards non-whites would lose them their cultivated base of racially fearful whites, who get no benefit from the party’s true agenda of aid to corporations and the wealthy, while bringing negligible gains elsewhere.

They’ll use magical thinking to ignore the problem, postponing the reckoning and reconfiguring of the party for a later, more apocalyptic election that may actually destroy the party instead of giving this one an opportunity to change.

Republicans lost pretty much every competitive race Tuesday, and you can tell it’s serious because they seem to actually be preparing for some soul searching over What Went Wrong. It’s about time.

They’ve been doing their best to ensure extinction by pinning their hopes on white men, formerly sufficient as a single-race/gender voting bloc to win elections. But that’s been obviously declining for over a decade, and this is the first time the party seems to be giving serious thought to trying anything different.

I think periods of shift in political party positioning and ideology are really interesting, so I’m going to be reading what Republicans and conservatives are writing and saying about what the problem is and how to fix it. And then I’ll cover that from my own radical-left perspective because I think that’ll be funny.

Will we see a new party come out of this? Or will the Republicans of 2016 be very different from those of 2012? Will they find themselves too locked into their current course to make serious changes in platform, and end up losing even worse 4 years from now? This should be fun.

The standoff, which lasted several hours, grew intense as police officers, some in riot gear and gas masks, and protesters, some wearing all black, confronted one another, and shoving and scuffles broke out.

Why were those militant jerk anarchist protesters wearing BLACK? Don’t they know that’s the sort of thing that’s going to antagonize friendly police officers and force them to put on their riot gear and gas masks?